Vast satellite constellations are alarming astronomers

“There were all these panic messages,” remembers Olivier Hainaut of the European Southern Observatory : “‘Oh my God, it's the end, it's the end of astronomy as we know it!’” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, says he was “gobsmacked” by how bright the satellites were.

The company’s reusable rockets have allowed it to act on those plans at unprecedented speed. The first shell, consisting of 1,584 satellites, was completed in just two years; its services have beta testers over much of the world. SpaceX plans to put up more than a thousand a year from now on, and to pick up the pace when it replaces its Falcons with its next-generation Starships.

The reason that providing high-bandwidth services from space requires satellites in such large numbers is basically geometrical. Moving large amounts of data quickly is much easier if the receiver and transmitter are quite close. But satellites close to the surface move across the sky very quickly. So to be sure there are always a few in the sky over every user means you have to have a very large number of them.

But in either case they will transform the practice of amateur and professional astronomy. A study by theshows that at Paranal, a site in Chile which is home to the organisation’s magnificent, if prosaically named, Very Large Telescope there might typically be over 500 satellites visible in the sky at the beginning of the night . In long astronomical exposures, as pictured above, the paths of such satellites streak the sky like the bars of a jail cell.

Conflict between star-gazing and communications is not entirely new. Radio astronomers have had to deal with interference from broadcasters for decades. But radio waves beamed from an antenna, whether on Earth or in orbit, can be regulated.

Dialogues between astronomers and SpaceX engineers have mitigated the worst of the problems by tweaking the satellites’ design. In operation each of the Starlinks looks like a cross between a windsurfer and a junk. They consist of a three-metre-long rectangular board, known as the bus, on the bottom side of which are the antennae used to pick up and transmit signals, and a nine-metre rectangular solar panel that stands above the bus like a sail.

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